Knowledge is Good

If you can read this, thank a teacher. May 3 is National Teacher Day. But that's only in 2005. Actually, the official day is the Tuesday of the first full week of May. (Leave it to the NEA to complicate it.) Be that as it may, it's as good a time as any to remember and appreciate the great teachers in your life. Everybody's had at least a few; and the fortunate have had many more. Excellent teachers leave legacies that outlive them by generations. They quietly work long hours and often dig deep into their own pockets to make lessons richer for their students. Our best should be recognized and rewarded well-beyond current levels. And the bad ones should be thrown under a big yellow bus to make way for another good one (but that's an essay for another day). For now, let's appreciate the best we've had for all the qualities that made them rise above the rest. For me, it was a tough call, but what the heck. Thank you, Mrs. Shutler, wherever you are.... If you can read this and it's in English, thank a soldier. This past weekend I had the privilege of meeting a young man who was home from his third tour of Afghanistan as a special ops soldier. He is a 26 year old college graduate capable of killing anyone anywhere in a dark room without making a sound or leaving a mark. Talk about some good teachers! He is focused, capable, articulate and extremely positive about the dangerous work over there. In fact, the only fear this soldier expressed in a long conversation about Afghanistan and the Taliban was at the mere thought of a Hillary Clinton presidency in '08. Tom Brokaw can carp all he wants about the greatness of previous generations. I sleep like a baby knowing we have many thousands of young people like the one above who serve by choice with such a high level of professionalism. C'mon, Osama, take a little peek out of that cave.... If you didn't go to Kent State, thank your guidance counselor. With the 35th anniversary of the Kent State shootings tomorrow, we can all look forward to an ample dose of sappy nostalgia and wheezing rage from the never-left-the-sixties crowd. Actually (and fortunately for many of us) some of them never left the Kent State campus. They are comfortably suckling the public teat as tenured professors and university administrators, and they remain, even today, intoxicated by those heady days of the anti-war movement. These flannel-wrapped fossils lament the lack of student activism on today's campus and whine that few students are eager to pay tuition dollars to study the glory days of the counter-culture . They are as angry as old people can get, and with every passing year they lose relevance at the same rate as the Kent State tragedy itself. The final chapter of their sad saga is all but written. After whole careers spent fanning embers that have long gone cold... there are few students anywhere that will list them as teachers-to-appreciate today or ever.